IT
is Sunday, May 26, the brightest, pleasantest, most comfortable of
forenoons. I am seated in the sun at the base of an ancient stone
wall, near the road that runs along the hillside above the Landaff
Valley. Behind me is a little farmhouse, long since gone to ruin. At
my feet, rather steeply inclined, is an old cattle pasture thickly
strewn with massive boulders. The prospect is one of those that I
love best. In the foreground, directly below, is the valley, freshly
green, and, as it looks from this height, as level as a floor. Alder
rows mark the winding course of the river, and on the farther side,
close against the forest, runs a road, though the eye, of itself,
would hardly know it.

Across
the valley are the glorious newly clad woods, more beautiful than
words can begin to tell; and beyond them rise the mountains:
Moosilauke, far enough away to be blue; the shapely Kinsman range, at
whose long green slopes no man need tire of looking; rocky Lafayette,
directly in front of me; Haystack, with its leaning knob; the sombre
Twins and the more Alpine-looking Washington, Jefferson, and Adams.
Farther to the north are the low hills of Cleveland and Agassiz. A
magnificent horizon. Lafayette, Washington, Jefferson, and Adams are
still flecked with snow. And over the mountains is the sky, with high
white clouds, cirrus and cumulus. I look first at the mountains, then
at the valley, which is filled with sunlight as a cup is filled with
wine. The level foreground is the essential thing. Without it the
grandest of mountain prospects is never quite complete.

Swallows
circle about me continually, a phoebe calls at short intervals, and
less often I hear the sweet voice of a bluebird. Both phoebe and
bluebird are most delightfully plentiful in all this fair mountain
country. They are of my own mind: they like old farms within sight of
hills. Crows caw, a jay screams, and now and then the hurrying
drumbeats of a grouse come to my ears. Somewhere in the big sugar
grove behind me a great-crested flycatcher has been shouting almost
ever since I sat down. The “great screaming flycatcher,” he
should be called. His voice is more to the point than his crest. He
loves the sound of it.

How
radiantly beautiful the red maple groves are just now! I can see two,
one near, the other far off, both in varying shades of red, yellow,
and green. The earth wears them as ornaments, and is as proud of
them, I dare believe, as of the Parthenon. They are bright, but not
too bright. They speak of youth — and the eye hears them. A red-eye
preaches as if he knew the day of the week. What a gift of
reiteration! “Buy the truth,” he says. “Going, going!” But it
is never gone. Down the valley road goes an open carriage. In it are
a man and a woman, the woman with a parasol over her head. A song
sparrow sings his little tune, and the bluebird gives himself up to
warbling. Few voices can surpass his for sweetness and
expressiveness. The grouse drums again (let every bird be happy in
his own way), a myrtle warbler trills (a talker to himself), and a
passing goldfinch drops a melodious measure. All the chokecherry
bushes are now in white. The day may be Whitsunday for all that my
unchurchly mind can say. Red cherries, which whitened the world a few
days ago, are fast following the shadbushes, which have been out of
flower for a week. Apple trees, too, have passed the height of their
splendor. The vernal procession moves like a man in haste.

The
sun grows warm. I will betake myself to the maple grove and sit in
the shadow; but first I notice in the grass by the wall an abundance
of tiny veronica flowers (speedwell) — white, streaked with purple,
as I perceive when I pluck one. Not a line but runs true. Everything
is beautiful in its time; the little speedwell no less than the
valley and the mountain. A red squirrel, far out on a tilting elm
spray, is eating his fill of the green fruit. Mother Earth takes care
of her children. She raises elm seeds as man raises wheat. And
foolish man wonders sometimes at what he thinks her waste of vital
energy.

I
have found a seat upon a prostrate maple trunk, one of the fathers of
the grove, so huge of girth that it was almost a gymnastic feat to
climb into my position. Here I can see the valley and the mountains
only in parts, between the leafy intervening branches. Which way of
seeing is the better I will not seek to determine. Both are good —
both are better than either. A flycatcher near me is saying chebec
with such emphasis that though I cannot see him I can imagine that he
is almost snapping his head off at every utterance. Much farther away
is a relative of his; we call him the olive-side. (I wonder what name
the birds have for us.) Que-quee-o, he whistles in
the
clearest of tones. He is one of the good ones. And how well his voice
“carries” — as if one grove were speaking to another!

About
my feet are creamy white tiarella spires and pretty blue violets. The
air is full of the hum of insects, but they are all innocent. I sit
under my own beech and maple tree, with none to molest or make me
afraid. How many times I have heard something like that on a Sunday
forenoon Year in and out, our dear old preacher could never get
through his “long prayer” without it. He would not be sorry to
know that I think of him now in this natural temple.

An
unseen Nashville warbler suddenly announces himself. “If you must
scribble,” he says, “my name is as good as anybody’s.” The
little flycatcher has not yet dislocated his neck. Chebec,
chebec,
he vociferates. The swallows no longer come about me. They care not
for groves. They are for the open sky, the grass fields, and the sun;
but I hear them twittering overhead. If I could be a bird, I think I
would be a swallow. Hark! Yes, there is the syllabled whistle of a
white-breasted nuthatch. He must go into my vacation bird-list —
No. 79, Sittacarolinensis. If
he would have shown
himself sooner he should have had a higher place. And now, to my
surprise, I hear the rollicking voice of a bobolink. The meadow below
contains many of his happy kind, and one of them bas come up within
hearing to brighten my page.

All
the time I have sat here I have been hoping to hear the hearty,
“full-throated” note of a yellow-throated vireo. This is the only
place in Franconia where I have ever heard it — two years ago this
month. But the bird seems not to be here now, and I must not stay
longer. My companion, who has gone higher up the hill to visit a
thorn bush, will be expecting me on the bridge by the old grist-mill.

Before
I can get away, however, I add another name to my bird-list, — a
welcome name, the wood pewee’s. He has just arrived from the South,
I suppose. What a sweetly modulated, plaintive-sounding whistle! How
different from the bobolink’s “jest and youthful jollity!” And
now the crested breaks out again all at once, alter a long silence.
There is a still stronger contrast. Four flycatchers are in voice
together: the crested, the olive-sided, the least, and the wood
pewee. I have heard them all within the space of a minute. As soon as
I am in the valley I shall hear the alder flycatcher, and when,
braving the mosquitoes, I venture into the tamarack swamp a little
way to look at the Cape May warbler (I know the very spot) I shall
doubtless hear the yellow-belly. These, with the kingbird and the
phoebe, which are about all the farms, make the full New Hampshire
contingent. No doubt there are flies enough for all of them.

As
I start to leave the grove, stepping over beds of round-leaved
violets and spring beauties, both out of flower already, I start at
the sound of an unmusical note, which I do not immediately recognize,
but which in another instant I settle upon as a sapsucker’s. This
is a bird at whose absence my companion and I have frequently
expressed surprise, remembering how common we have found him in
previous visits. I go in pursuit at once, and presently come upon
him. He is in extremely bright plumage, his crown and his throat
blood red. He goes down straightway as No. 81. I am having a
prosperous day. Three new names within half an hour I Idling in a
sugar orchard is good for a man’s bird-list as well as for his
soul.

An
oven-bird is declaiming, a blue yellow-back is practicing scales, and
a field sparrow is chanting. And even as I pencil their names a
nuthatch (the very one I have been hearing) flies to a maple trunk
and alights for a moment at the door of his nest. Without question he
passed a morsel to his brooding mate, though I was not quick enough
to see him. Yes, within a minute or two he is there again; but the
sitting bird does not appear at the entrance; her mate thrusts his
bill into the door instead. The happy pair! There is much family life
of the best sort in a wood like this. No doubt there are husbands and
wives, so called, in Franconia as well as in other places, who might
profitably heed the old injunction, “Behold the fowls of the air.”